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Big News in Washington, but Far Fewer Cover It

WASHINGTON — A new president arrived from a new party. The balance of power shifted in Congress. Legions of fresh new faces showed up in the nation’s capital with new ideas, eager to upend the way the country does business.

The year was 2000, and Cox Newspapers had about 30 people in Washington to cover the new Bush administration.

Eight years later, a similar transformation is under way, the stakes heightened by two foreign wars and the worst economic collapse in decades, but Cox will not be there to cover it. Cox, the publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Austin American-Statesman and 15 other papers, announced this month that its Washington bureau would simply close its doors on April 1.

Cox is not alone. Another major chain, Advance Publications, owner of The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and other papers, just closed a Washington bureau that had more than 20 people.

Like a number of smaller papers, The San Diego Union-Tribune recently shuttered its bureau, which had four people at the end. Three years ago, the parent company, Copley Press, had an 11-person bureau in Washington, but it has since sold most of its papers.

Those that remain have cut back drastically on Washington coverage, eliminating hundreds of journalists’ jobs at a time when the federal government — and journalistic oversight of it — matters more than ever. Television and radio operations in Washington are shrinking, too, although not as sharply.

The times may be news-rich, but newspapers are cash-poor, facing their direst financial straits since the Depression. Racing to cut costs as they lose revenue, most have decided that their future lies in local news, not national or international events. That has put a bull’s-eye on expensive Washington bureaus.

Albert R. Hunt, Washington executive editor at Bloomberg News, said he was taken aback by the mood Saturday night at a dinner of the Washington press corps’ Gridiron Club. “It was like being at a wake,” he said. “Every time you turned around, someone was talking about their bureau being closed or downsized.”

A few years ago, after much debate, the club began to admit magazine and television reporters. Now, without them, “there couldn’t be a Gridiron Club,” Mr. Hunt said. “You couldn’t get enough newspaper people.”

The Tribune Company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last week, recently merged the once-formidable bureaus of The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and other papers. The combined bureau has about 32 people, compared with the more than 70 the papers had there a year ago.

“I think the cop is leaving the beat here, and I think it’s a terrible loss for citizens,” said Andy Alexander, the Cox bureau chief, who is retiring. “But I can’t argue with the business decision that Cox has made, at a time when papers can’t even find the resources to cover the local zoning board.”

Cox’s decision was tied to its plan to sell most of its papers, but even without that impetus, the bureau would have become much smaller, said Sandy Schwartz, president of Cox Newspapers. “There are tremendous economic pressures,” he said. “We are in a crisis situation. All newspapers are.”

As large chains leave, some of their papers — including two of Cox’s — dip into their own budgets to keep a few reporters in Washington, but they are the exceptions.

“From an informed public standpoint, it’s alarming,” said Representative Kevin Brady, a Republican from the Houston area, who has seen The Houston Chronicle’s team in Washington drop to three people, from nine, in two years. “They’re letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable.”

A few organizations have bucked the trend, including The Wall Street Journal, which has put more reporters in Washington in the last year, and The New York Times, whose bureau has not changed much in size for years. Each paper has almost 50 people in Washington.

Photo

"They're letting go those with the most institutional knowledge, which helps reporters hold elected officials accountable," said Kevin Brady, a Republican Congressman from Texas who said The Houston Chronicle's team in Washington shrank by two-thirds.Credit
Joe Marquette/Bloomberg News

To compensate somewhat for the retreat by its clients, The Associated Press bureau recently shuffled reporters to provide state-specific reports from Washington on all 50 states. The Bloomberg News bureau has expanded in recent years, and a few Internet sources, like Politico, are still expanding, but the number of journalists added is a fraction of the number lost.

The real growth has been among narrowly focused news organizations, especially those that report on finance, said Joe Keenan, superintendent of the Senate press gallery. “It seems like, for every newspaper that leaves, a niche publication comes in,” he said.

Newspaper executives say it makes no economic sense to have hundreds of reporters writing about the same set of events each day. Even the affected journalists concede that on breaking news, news agency articles are often fine for their papers.

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The much greater loss, the journalists say, is the decline of Washington reporting on local matters — the foibles of a hometown congressman or a public works project in the paper’s backyard. One after another, they cited the example of the San Diego paper’s Washington bureau for exposing the corruption of Representative Randall Cunningham, who is known as Duke.

In accepting a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 2006, “we were bold enough to hope that it would be the first of many, but it turned out to be the high point,” said George E. Condon Jr., the last bureau chief. “No matter how much great journalism is done by national organizations, they’re simply not geared to monitor closely a member of Congress from, say, San Diego, who’s not a national leader.”

Several newspapers are locked into leases for more Washington office space than they now need, and have become landlords to others. This year, the Hearst newspapers bureau became a tenant of the McClatchy bureau, and The Union-Tribune had been leasing space to several small papers that now must find new offices.

As bureaus shrink, they cut back on in-depth and investigative projects and from having reporters assigned to cover specific federal agencies.

“We used to cover the Pentagon, combing through defense contracts, and we’re covering some of that out of Dallas now, but basically we don’t do it anymore,” said Carl Leubsdorf, chief of The Dallas Morning News bureau, which had 11 people four years ago, and now has four. “We had someone at the Justice Department, but no longer. We can’t free someone up for a long time to do a major project.”

Few newspapers travel with the president now — only three or four on some trips — where a dozen would have been the bare minimum a few years ago. For those that still participate, the shared cost of travel and the rotating burden of providing pool reports has soared. The Senate press gallery was recently remodeled in a way that left room for fewer reporters’ carrels, and no one complained.

There are no definitive figures on the number of newspaper reporters covering Washington, but the decline has been clear, and it runs counter to history, said Donald A. Ritchie, associate Senate historian and author of the book “Reporting From Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps.”

“In times of great change and crisis, usually the press corps grows,” he said. Despite the strain of the Depression, he said, “When F.D.R. took office, newspapers sent far more people to Washington.”

Newspapers in recent years have cut every kind of worker, from drivers to press operators. But the newsroom expense they have deemed particularly expendable is reporting far from home — work that means office rents, heavy travel expenses and some of their biggest salaries. The few papers that had foreign bureaus have closed most of them, but in sheer numbers, the withdrawal from Washington has been much greater.

Industry consolidation, like Tribune absorbing the Times Mirror Company in 2000, has fueled the trend, but it goes far beyond just eliminating duplication.

Most papers, even those in big cities, have wagered their survival on local news, printing far fewer reports from Washington, Beijing or Baghdad, and relying more on news agencies for those articles. A survey of newspaper editors released in July by the Pew Research Center found that 57 percent said they published less national news than they did three years earlier, while 62 percent said they printed more community-level news.

“About four years ago, we became intensely local,” said Mr. Alexander, the Cox bureau chief. “We provide a very high percentage of copy out of Washington that our papers can’t get from other sources, because it’s on local people and local issues. And the 17 Cox papers have used an average of 4,500 of our stories a year.”